Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's new book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of
America," is without doubt one of the most important publishing events in
the annals of American education in the last hundred years. John Dewey's
"School and Society," published in 1899, set American education on its
course to socialism. Rudolf Flesch's "Why Johnny Can't Read," published in
1955, informed American parents that there was something terribly wrong
with the way the schools were teaching children to read, and my own book,
"NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education," published in 1984, explained in
great detail how and why the decline in public education was taking place.
But Iserbyt has done what no one else wanted or could do. She has put
together the most formidable and practical compilation of documentation
describing the well-planned "deliberate dumbing down" of American children
by their education system. Anyone who has had any lingering hope that what
the educators have been doing is a result of error, accident, or stupidity
will be shocked by the way American social engineers have systematically
gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for
the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world
government controlled by behavioral and social scientists.

This mammoth book is the size of a large city phone book: 462 pages of
documentation, 205 pages of appendices, and a 48-page Index. The
documentation is "A Chronological Paper Trail" which starts with the Sowing
of the Seeds in the late 18th and 19th centuries, proceeds to The Turning
of the Tides, then to The Troubling Thirties, The Fomentation of the
Forties and Fifties, The Sick Sixties, The Serious Seventies, The
"Effective" Eighties, and finally, the Noxious Nineties. The educators and
social engineers indict themselves with their own words.

Iserbyt decided to compile this book because, as a "resister" to what is
going on in American education, she was being constantly told that she was
taking things out of context. The book, she writes, "was put together
primarily to satisfy my own need to see the various components which led to
the dumbing down of the United States of America assembled in chronological
order -- in writing. Even I, who had observed these weird activities taking
place at all levels of government, was reluctant to accept a malicious
intent behind each individual, chronological activity or innovation, unless
I could connect it with other, similar activities taking place at other
times."

And that is what this book does. It connects educators, social engineers,
planners, government grants, federal and state agencies, billion-dollar
foundations, think tanks, universities, research projects, policy
organizations, etc., showing how they have worked together to advance an
agenda that will change America from a free republic to a socialist state.

What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the
American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the
American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and
way of life by lavishly financing through federal and state grants the very
social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and
preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world
order.

One of the interesting insights revealed by these documents is how the
social engineers use a deliberately created education "crisis" to move
their agenda forward by offering radical reforms that are sold to the
public as fixing the crisis -- which they never do. The new reforms simply
set the stage for the next crisis, which provides the pretext for the next
move forward. This is the dialectical process at work, a process our
behavioral engineers have learned to use very effectively. Its success
depends on the ability of the "change agents" to continually deceive the
public, which tends to believe any lie the experts tell them.

Iserbyt's long journey to becoming a "resister," started in 1973 when her
son, a fourth grader, brought home from school a purple ditto sheet,
embellished with a smiley face, entitled, "All About Me." She writes, "The
questions were highly personal; so much so that they encouraged my son to
lie, since he didn't want to 'spill the beans' about his mother, father and
brother. The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out the student's
state of mind, how he felt, what he liked and disliked, and what his values
were. With this knowledge it would be easier for the government school to
modify his values and behavior at will -- without, of course, the student's
knowledge or his parents' consent."

From that time on, Iserbyt became an activist in education. She became a
member of a philosophy committee for a school, was elected as a school
board member, co-founded Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM), and
finally became senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research
and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education during President
Reagan's first term of office.

As a school board member she learned that in American education, the end
justifies the means. "Our change agent superintendent," she writes, "was
more at home with a lie than he was with the truth." Whatever good she
accomplished while on the school board was tossed out two weeks after she
left office.

It was during her tenure in the Department of Education in Washington,
D.C., where she had access to the grant proposals from change agents, that
she came to the conclusion that what was happening in American education
was the result of a concerted effort on the part of numerous individuals
and organizations -- a globalist elite -- to bring about permanent changes
in America's body politic. She was relieved of her duties after leaking an
important technology grant -- a computer-assisted instruction proposal --
to the press.

Another reason why Iserbyt decided to publish this book is because of the
reluctance of Americans to face unpleasant truths about their government
educators. She wants parents to have access to the kinds of documents that
were only circulated among the change agent educators themselves. She wants
parents to see for themselves what has been planned for their children and
the kind of socialist-fascist world their children will have to live in if
we do nothing to counter these plans.

Therefore, getting this book into the hands of thousands of Americans ought
to be a major project for lovers of liberty in the year 2000. It will do
more to defeat the change agents than anything else I can think of.